Rotary Park will include playground equipment that will be accessible to children with disabilities and a pier for fishing and kayaking.

Volunteers, including many Alcoa Howmet employees, hauled brush to a chipper from the city of Muskegon. The goal was to clear out the brush and invasive tree species, creating a clear path to the water, team leader Mark Evans said.

“The cottonwoods will stay, but the locusts and the willows, they’re going to go,” he said.

Other volunteers, including part of the Muskegon Lumberjacks hockey team, repainted the Heritage Landing pavilion, along with the grills and trash cans around it. Closer to the edge of Muskegon Lake, restoration ecologist Brian Majka gave instructions to volunteers planting native grasses and wildflowers.

“The one rule: green side up,” he said. “If you do that, 90 percent of these plants are going to live.”

The volunteers put in about 3,000 plants, spaced about one foot apart in a large plant bed, Majka said. Since the plants are wild, they’ll grow together and provide habitat for small animals, he said.

“It’s going to fill in very quickly and densely around here,” he said.

A few miles away, a group of volunteers, many of them children, cleared brush at Wesley Park, as well as spreading sand around playground equipment, repainting the restroom building and the metal part of the soccer nets and creating an area for hopscotch and other children’s games.

Laketon Township Supervisor Kim Arter said she worked with a group of teens to turn an old, mostly unused shuffleboard court into an area for kids. The group painted boxes for four square and hopscotch, and left an area clean for budding chalk artists.

Jen Fairweather’s fourth-grade class from Oakridge Upper Elementary School spread sand around playground equipment to provide a soft landing surface. The project fits in well with a book they had read about giving back, Fairweather said, and it gave the special needs students in the class a chance to feel like they were doing something valuable for the community.

Fourth-grader Gabrielle Tennant said she liked helping to make Wesley Park look better.

“Everybody’s coming out to help the park and most people don’t even come here,” she said. “They’re just doing it for everybody else.”